Develop a Specialty

At a day and age when supply outweighs demand, and everyone needs to  differientate themselves from the rest of the resume pool, we recalled this post of career advice that we want to add to the “become an artisan at your job” school of thought:

Freelance web design jobs are all unique — each one is different. So it’s important to keep up your skills in all the basic web technologies.

At the same time, it can be lucrative to develop a specialty. Interface design — the process of making a website or application easier are clearer to use — is one area where contracts are widely available.

Another kind of specialty might involve one specific area of content. For instance, if you know a lot about opera and have a great portfolio, you might market yourself to popular opera singers, opera companies, and singers’ agents to build opera-related sites.

Designer and blogger Andy Budd describes the ideal skill set as being like an inverted T — a base of expertise plus one (or maybe more) deep specialty.

Tags: freelancers, Industry Trends, training

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 4:30 am and is filed under Career Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.